


glissades of ingenuousness/ingeniousness

by eraserheadbaby



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, Hilclaude Week 2020, Pre-Timeskip | Academy Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:06:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24612742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eraserheadbaby/pseuds/eraserheadbaby
Summary: They'll keep dancing around each other for as long as it takes until their trajectories meet.
Relationships: Hilda Valentine Goneril/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13
Collections: Hilclaude Week 2020





	glissades of ingenuousness/ingeniousness

**Author's Note:**

> written for hilclaude week 2020, day 2, prompt: dancing

She doesn't know if that was the first time she noticed, but it was definitely the time that stood out the most to her.

Not that it was a special occasion or anything. Just another day at the dinning hall; another day when Hilda just happened to look at Claude as he was getting his food. Over the fresh steam of roast, the cooks were showering Claude with praise for some of his recent achievements. The specifics elude her now, but it's not like she cares anyway, and it's not like there's a shortage of things to praise Claude for.

Hilda can now cull only one animate memory out of the scene – the cooks' words. Epithets and nouns so weighty even Teach would bat an eyelash or two at their sound. Not that Claude was apparently unaffected. His lips were yet again forming that dopey arch, that hollowed his cheeks in just the right way to give him the air of boyish, transparent pride.

But his eyes. There was nothing there.

It's not that they had dulled, their green was as brilliant as ever. Like fireflies, they'll keep you spellbound in their fairytale light, until you forget about the darkness surrounding you and them both, until you forget that the light will fade once you look away and the sun comes up.

That first time, she simply looked, looked and looked, until she remembered nothing but those forbidding eyes. But it's not like she understood anything out of the picture that had imprinted itself on her mind. And that is just like her, isn't it, wasting entire hours on something and not absorbing anything in the end. So everything was as it should be.

Less normal was when that one time became a habit. Hilda wrote down more and more: the hidden stiffness of his laidback arms behind his head. Those inviting sweeps of his arms as he talked, that seemed just a way to swat others away if you looked at them from the right angle. The effortless jokes, that even though they were never the same, because he's a damn comedian or something, they sounded like copies of the same tired, hackneyed script.

And once those wispy bits of memory swarmed, they propelled away from Claude and straight onto Hilda herself: wasn't that sloppily happy line of his mouth too reminiscent of the bored droop of her own lips? And their voices and words, somehow both completely different and one and the same - broken records trying to override noises (voices, words) they didn't want to hear.

Maybe that was what made the image so attractive to her. Who doesn't like admiring themselves in the mirror?

And that would have been the wind-up of it all, if Claude always stayed like her mind had captured him that one time, faraway and untouchable. Yet, the more her everyday life in the academy establishes its boisterous norms, the more she finds Claude at its bends. Hilda talks with him more than anyone else, fights alongside him more than anyone else, works for him more than anyone else (much to her and her delicate complexion's dismay).

Up close, he is no different: his smiles look just as ductile when they are directed at her, already molded in the desired shape before she even turns to look at him. He laughs along to her claims of being a good for nothing, talentless fighter, yet takes full advantage of her in every battle. He talks to her a lot, and still tells her nothing at all.

Suddenly, the image isn't as attractive. Or maybe it is, in some other way- the way the ground draws your eyes when you're searching for earthed-up gold. If some wind blows the deceitful dirt Claude put on everyone's, on Hilda's eyes, what will be left? That's the question she's aching to find an answer for.

… Okay, that may be stretching it. To find the answer, she will have to work somehow, after all, and that's just not how she rolls.

And something else is there, looming at the back of her mind; she may not like what she'll dig up from this farcical excavation, and once again expectations will remain stillborn in the maybes hovering over her head.

So she'll keep their audienceless crosstalk going. They're both leading actors, but Hilda will do her best to steal the show. For every fake smile, she'll cry double the amount of lousy tears. For every forced joke, she'll nag thrice as much. And for every sneaky battle strategy he entrusted her with, she'll throw in four times the amount of self-deprecating complaints, a special offer just for her dear old Claude.

They'll keep dancing around each other for as long as it takes until their trajectories meet.

And when that happens, she'll only have to do what she always does: hope that the collision will leave behind something more than ashes and dust.


End file.
